Margie Stackhouse

We share an enduring connection with the natural world, one that threads through both our artistic practices and daily lives. Working both en plein air and in the studio, we are drawn to listening deeply to place, attentive to the details within living landscapes. This sensitivity forms the heart of our dialogue as artists and is what brings our work into conversation with one another.

Margie paints en plein air, looking outward to the world, engaging with a traditional picture plane – a window of perspective. Her paintings capture moments of presence with the natural world, translating the landscapes and forms she finds compelling into delicate and sensitive studies.

Katie approaches painting through a cross-disciplinary and sculptural sensibility, creating works on a flatbed picture plane. Her process is a physical and embodied one, co- authoring with the mountain itself. By laying canvas directly onto granite faces or coastal terrain and working the surface through frottage, she brings the material presence of these places into the work. This method began during her 2020 residency on Flinders Island, and the resulting series of granite paintings reflects the monumental forces of mountains and coastlines. These works sit alongside her broader practice of sculpture, video, and photography, exploring living systems, time, and human relationships with site.

For this exhibition, we come together in a shared reflection on landscape. Katie brings smaller-scale frottaged paintings that are further worked in the studio, into the gallery, while Margie presents intimate windows onto places in Australia and the American desert. Side by side, our works open a conversation between different ways of being with landscape – one through sensitive outward observation, the other through embodied collaboration with the terrain itself.